WLW mural mystery solved

Jun. 17, 2013

This photo was taken in 1931 by artist Winold Reiss for his mosaic mural of an engineer in the control room at WLW radio at Crosley Broadcasting. It shows WLW's studio technical supervisor Charlie Butler. / Provided/Cincinnati Museum Center

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Artist Winold Reiss' mosaic mural of workers at Crosley Broadcasting. At left is WLW's studio technical supervisor Charlie Butler. Reiss used Butler's body in the mural but the head is of one of Reiss' models, artist Alan Crane. At right is WLW orchestra leader Virginio Marucci. The mural is now in the baggage claim area of the closed Terminal 2 at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. / The Enquirer/Glenn Hartong

They were together when the mosaic hung in Union Terminal’s grand concourse as part of set of 16 industrial murals. Today, they face an uncertain future together, along with eight other murals, in two closed terminals at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.

The closed terminals are set to be demolished. So, at the age of 80, the murals must find a new home. Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory wants to house them in the Duke Energy Convention Center. He hopes generations of Cincinnatians will come face-to-face with some of the 35 faces on the industrial murals.

Those faces belong to 35 workers. Taken from source photos shot at Cincinnati-area businesses in 1931 – when Butler was 28 and living in Mount Healthy and Marucci was 34 and residing in Clifton – the workers’ images were transformed into murals from sketches and watercolors by artist Winold Reiss. They were installed at Union Terminal in 1933.

No plaque or list ever noted who’s who. The men in the murals have been a mystery forever. The Enquirer’s “Save the Murals” series hopes to preserve these pieces of history as well as make sure this mystery is solved. Identifying Butler and Marucci represents part of the solution.

“Charlie Butler was a genuinely nice man,” recalled Bill Myers, a former WLW announcer. They first met when Myers came to work for the station in 1952. By then, Butler had been the studio technical supervisor since 1928. He spent 40 years at WLW, retiring in 1968, three years before he died at the age of 68 in 1971.

Myers termed Butler’s work – “he was responsible for the sound that came out of the studio and went on the air” – and his easy-going ways as “first-rate.” As a rookie employee, he asked Butler for a Saturday night off so he could go on a riverboat cruise with the woman who became his wife. Butler made sure that happened. He even worked Myers’ shift.

Myers recalled that his wife, Marianne, also worked at the station, would greet Butler with the words: “Get off the wall, Charlie!” That was a reference to him being on the mural. At least, his body was there.

The source photo shows Butler standing at the master control panel and talking into a telephone receiver.

“He could have been talking to someone at a location, like Coney Island’s Moonlite Gardens, where we were doing a remote broadcast,” said Clyde Haehnle, WLW's 91-year-old retired vice-president of engineering. “Or, he could be talking to the network in New York. Back in 1931, that would have been NBC. Either way, he would be making sure the sound was technically perfect.”

Butler’s body matches the trim frame of the man in the mural.

His head is another story.

Reiss’ son, Tjark, said in 1993 that his father replaced Butler’s head with one belonging to a New York-based artist, Alan Horton Crane.

Maybe Reiss wanted someone with wavy hair. (Butler’s sat slicked-back and straight.) The artist got what he wanted with Crane. A late-in-life photo of Crane, who died in 1969, appears on the website, AskART.com, and shows him with a full head of wavy hair.

Marucci had the hair Reiss wanted, thick, dark, wavy. He landed on the mural in a follicular twist of fate.

The Italian immigrant’s name first came to the attention of the “Save the Murals” series thanks to a phone call from Dottie Pollard. The Monfort Heights woman, one of 939 readers responding to the series, used to live “two doors from” Marucci’s sister, Cornelia Melone, who died in 1990. “She was so proud of him being on the mural. When the Enquirer started running the photos from the murals in this series, I hoped I would see him.”

She also hoped to find an answer to the question: Why was he at a piano?

Rebecca Shockley, a professor of piano pedagogy at the University of Minnesota, knows why.

“My dad, Karl Payne Sr., and Virginio Marucci, two violinists in WLW’s orchestra, were watching Reiss set up his camera to take the source photos for the mural,” Shockley said, recalling a chapter of family history.

Reiss asked if either violinist played piano. Both did.

First he picked Payne. Then, he rejected him. His bald spot produced a glare in Reiss’ camera.

Marucci was next. He sat down at the piano and into posterity.

“My father was an arranger,” Marucci’s daughter, Nina, recalled from her home in Paris. “So, he could pick around on a piano. He could sit at the keyboard and make it look like he knew what he was doing.”

Marucci knew exactly what he was doing on the violin. He studied the instrument as a child before coming to America at 16 with his family from San Paolo di Civitate, Italy in 1913.

By 1929, he was playing violin in Cincinnati. He came to the Queen City at the behest of Fritz Reiner, music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra from 1922 until 1931, the year Marucci sat down for Reiss.

Reiner wanted Marucci to play for the CSO. The violinist chose WLW.

“Radio was young,” Nina Marucci said. “He felt it was more promising.”

He made the most of that promise. Marucci’s good looks and his talent made his name. WLW possessed the power to broadcast shows to South America. Publicity photos of him went south. Love notes came north.

“My father’s matinee-idol good looks had the South American girls swooning,” said his daughter.

He also made a lasting contribution to “Moon River.” The late-night show of poetry and soporific music was broadcast by WLW from 1930 until 1972.

“Virginio suggested the theme song for the show,” noted Mike Martini, radio historian and producer-announcer for Springdale’s WMKV-FM. Marucci recorded the song, “Caprice Viennois” by Fritz Kreisler, and it was played throughout the run of the show outlasting Marucci's stay at WLW.

The violinist retired from the radio station in January 1960. He died 11 months later at the age of 63.

But, he plays on forever in that mosaic.

“He never talked about being on the mural,” his daughter said. “He did not talk about himself.”

He did take his little girl to see him on the wall in 1934, one year after the terminal opened.

All the away from Paris and 79 years later, Nina Marucci can still see him on the mural.